Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: Fast and Furious

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, April 13, 2017:

Eric Holder, the man behind the operation, who denied it all.

On the evening of December 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and other BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) agents were patrolling Peck Canyon in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, about 11 miles north of the Mexico border. They ran into five members of a “rip crew” — low-level drug cartel operatives looking for drug smugglers to rob — and attempted to arrest them. When Terry and the others fired non-lethal beanbag rounds, the rip crew responded with automatic fire from AK-47 rifles. In the resulting firefight, Terry was killed. The suspected triggerman, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes, was arrested on Wednesday on a ranch on the border of the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua.

His arrest was the result of a coordinated effort by the DEA, U.S. Marshalls, and BORTAC. This ends the search for the fifth and final member of that rip crew. The other four are serving long prison sentences for their part in the incident.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, April 14, 2017:

English: Cropped version of File:Official portrait of Barack Obama.jpg. The image was cropped at a 3:4 portrait ratio, it was slightly sharpened and the contrast and colors were auto-adjusted in photoshop. This crop, in contrast to the original image, centers the image on Obama’s face and also removes the flag that takes away the focus from the portrait subject. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The so-called gun-walking scandal known as Operation Fast and Furious was a secretive, phony, and ultimately failed attempt to attack the Second Amendment. The official story was much different. Richard Serrano, writing in the Los Angeles Times in October 2011 bought the lie and then repeated it:

In re-introducing the ATF Elimination Act on Thursday, January 12, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) explained one of the primary reasons why: “The ATF is a scandal-ridden, largely duplicative agency that has been branded by failure and lacks a clear mission. It is plagued by backlogs, funding gaps, hiring challenges, and a lack of leadership.”

Not once did he explain the real reason the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF for short) should be eliminated:

Deputy Director Thomas Brandon, head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) appeared on CBS’s Sunday Morning television show, complaining that his agency is “a small agency with a big job” and that he really needs more agents and more money to do that job.

What he would really like, however, is a computerized database of all gun purchases made by every buyer and seller in the country:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 6, 2016:

President Obama’s attempts to usurp legislative authority in his executive orders issued on Tuesday are meeting escalating resistance — enough resistance that may, for all intents and purposes, negate his efforts entirely.

Most commentators seized upon the threat to the separation of powers doctrine upon which the Constitution is based, including this author’s article published immediately after the announcement. While valid, likely court challenges aren’t the only obstacle standing in the way of the implementation of those orders.

For one thing, the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) already faces immense difficulties in successfully charging someone with illegally selling firearms without a license. Said Daniel O’Kelly, a retired ATF agent:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, December 4, 2015:

President Barack Obama signs into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as Vice President Joe Biden looks on.

President Obama’s reiteration of his claim that “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency” on Tuesday following the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs, galvanized John Lott to refute it. Lott, the author of More Guns, Less Crime and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, examined the facts and published them at Fox News.

The one question Loretta Lynch, Obama’s nominee to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General, fears the most, is about to be asked: “Why did you cut such a sweet deal for HSBC in light of the decades-long history of money-laundering amounting to millions of dollars of assistance to America’s enemies?”

With the announcement on Friday that French authorities are joining with the Swiss government to investigate HSBC’s Swiss branch for setting up tax-dodge schemes comes the awakening of an issue Lynch certainly hoped would never come back.

Friday’s news that French state financial prosecutors were joining with the Swiss government in pursuing charges that HSBC’s Swiss banking division was engaging in illegal tax dodges for their wealthy clients may have spelled the end of the nomination of Loretta Lynch (shown) to replace Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General.

Three years ago, Lynch caved in and let HSBC off the hook with a modest fine and a slap on the wrist following its investigation into the bank’s money-laundering activities that helped fund Middle East terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. Lynch’s agreement insulated guilty parties from criminal prosecution while allowing the bank’s money laundering activities to continue despite its agreeing to a “cease and desist” order.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, March 11, 2015:

The groundswell of public and congressional opposition against the ATF’s proposed ban on 5.56 M855 rifle ammunition was so swift and strong that the agency announced on Tuesday that it was backing down. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was not only bombarded with more than 80,000 negative responses to its latest anti-Second Amendment maneuver, but it also was blasted in Congress, where 238 House members and 52 senators signed letters opposing the ammo ban. Not only that, but legislation has been introduced to abolish the agency.

One of those signing the letter of opposition in the House — the one circulated by Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) — was none other than the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative John Culberson (R-Texas). Culberson is a Tea Party favorite and no friend of the ATF, and his committee has jurisdiction over funding for the ATF.

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 28, 2015:

Today and tomorrow, President Obama’s nominee to replace Eric Holder as attorney general, Loretta Lynch (shown), will face questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s highly unlikely that any of those questions will focus on how her office handled the case of Felix Sater while she was U.S. district attorney in New York (details on the Sater case further down). Without that information being obtained, however, her confirmation hearings will miss a vital part of understanding just how Lynch is likely to handle the job as attorney general.

Instead, she is more likely to be asked about Obama’s policies using executive privilege not only to impose delays on deporting illegal immigrants, but also to mark up ObamaCare according to his own views, and to launch a war in Libya.

Thanks to a groundswell of unhappiness over the economy, healthcare, a porous southern border, and increasing distrust of government in general, Republicans who were swept into office run the risk of thinking that Tuesday’s nearly complete sweep was a vote for them and their policies. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “Many voters said they cast [their] ballots more in opposition to one candidate than [in] support for the other.” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, got it right: “The president took a beating last night!”

Republicans used the president’s increasing unpopularity to connect their opponents’ support for his policies like a millstone, dragging them down to defeat. This marks two mid-term defeats that, according to the Journal, “rank among the

Some Republicans are beginning to lick their chops in anticipation of a takeover of the Senate in November. New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised to rein in Obamacare, pass a real budget, and hold hearings on the EPA’s onerous greenhouse gas regulations – which would resonate positively with his coal-fired constituents in Kentucky.

This article first appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 24, 2014:

Initial hopes were that somehow the bad press that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (still known as ATF) has been receiving had caused the agency to pull back in its prosecution of criminal cases involving guns. But those hopes have faded.

Reports from Syracuse University showed that there were 6,791 such prosecutions recommended by the ATF in President George W. Bush’s last year (2008), while there were just 5,082 gun violation cases under Obama in 2013 — a decline of 25 percent. The all-time high occurred during the Bush administration in 2004, when 8,752 cases were brought by the Justice Department. And so far this year, prosecutions have declined even further, likely to end the year at fewer than 4,400, if the present trend continues.

On the surface this appears to contradict the president, who stated, following the Newtown massacre, “We should get tougher on people who buy guns with the express purpose of turning around and selling them to criminals. And we should severely punish anybody who helps them do this.”

The obvious incongruity between these numbers and public pronouncements by the anti-gun president was reflected by Robert Cottrol, professor at George Washington University: “We have this irony. The Obama administration, which is asking for more in the way of gun regulations … is actually prosecuting less of the gun laws already on the books.”

Many excuses were offered to explain the dichotomy — among them, budget cuts and bad press. This appeared to be reinforced by some ATF agents interviewed anonymously by the Washington Times, who said the agency had been burned by scandals such as Fast and Furious and an extensive report by USA Today on setting up fake stings to entrap potential criminals:

The current climate within ATF is: Let’s take a step back and not go after too many hard-hitting violent crime cases that use informants or undercover agents. We can’t just go it alone anymore….

We need buy-in from everybody: local law enforcement [and] other agencies. Then, and only then, [will we be] able to sell it [and have] the U.S. attorney come on board.

There was sequestration, which a spokesman for the ATF used to explain the apparent decline: “ATF faces key resources challenges in staff attrition … resources are limited and difficult choices must be made with regard to priorities.”

The press has certainly been bad for the ATF. The “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal has become common knowledge in the United States, while the USA Today study is causing people to link “false stings” with the ATF as well. Back in June 2013, journalists at the paper invested hundreds of man-hours poring over thousands of pages of court records and agency files, not including hours of undercover recordings of sting operations that transcended the law. According to the paper, here’s how the ATF conjured stings to create arrests and convictions:

The stings work like this: When agents identify someone they suspect is ripping off drug dealers, they send in an undercover operative posing as a disgruntled courier or security guard to pitch the idea of stealing a shipment from his bosses. The potential score is almost always more than 5 kilograms of cocaine — enough drugs to fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars on the street, or to trigger sentences of 10 years or more in prison.

When the target shows up ready to commit the robbery, he and anyone else he brings with him are arrested and charged with a raft of federal crimes, the most serious of which is conspiring to sell the non-existent cocaine.

Upon conviction, the unsuspecting target could spend the next 25 years of his life in jail.

USA Today quoted a former ATF supervisor who asked rhetorically, “Do you want police to solve crimes, or do you want them to go out and prevent crimes that haven’t occurred yet?” Another ATF source defended the practice:

Are we supposed to wait for him to commit a murder before we target him as a bad guy? Are we going to sit back and say, well, this guy doesn’t have a bad record. OK, so you know, throw him back out there, let him kill somebody, then when he gets a bad record, then we’re going to put him in jail?

Judges have increasingly answered that question by calling such stings “disreputable,” “tawdry,” and bordering on entrapment.

A closer look at what the ATF is doing, however, shows a change in direction with undiminished enthusiasm. The focus now is not on the criminal and his crime, either present or future, but instead on the gun — who’s making it, shipping it, or buying it. For that, the ATF is using an obscure section of the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) that allows the agency to go after violations perceived in the making, shipping, buying, and selling of firearms. The rules are tricky and often difficult to follow. Here’s a brief snippet:

No person shall make a firearm unless he has (a) filed with the Secretary a written application, in duplicate, to make and register the firearm on the form prescribed by the Secretary; (b) paid any tax payable on the making and such payment is evidenced by the proper stamp affixed to the original application form; (c) identified the firearm to be made in the application form in such manner as the Secretary may by regulations prescribe; (d) identified himself in the application form in such manner as the Secretary may by regulations prescribe, except that, if such person is an individual, the identification must include his fingerprints and his photograph; and (e) obtained the approval of the Secretary to make and register the firearm and the application form shows such approval. Applications shall be denied if the making or possession of the firearm would place the person making the firearm in violation of law.

According to the Justice Department, just when prosecutions of criminals using guns has appeared to taper off, prosecutions under this obscure part of the NFA has increased an astounding 243 percent just in the last five years, and is up another 129 percent so far this year.

And then there’s the Hobbs Act, enacted in 1946, prohibiting the interstate shipment of property, including firearms, where there is any perception of illegality in the process. It is on track this year to become the third-most-prosecuted gun statute, compared to just a few years ago, according to the Times.

Robert Sanders, a former ATF assistant director, says the shift from criminals to guns is deliberate. “The agency’s philosophy has shifted to ‘guns are the problem and access to guns is the problem’ rather than the criminal being the direct instigator of crime.”

The ATF is not going away any time soon. It’s just morphing into a more efficient, effective, and frightening version of itself.

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 2, 2014:

In an astonishing admission, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, after reviewing the Obama administration’s scandals, wrote:

The Obama presidency’s parade of miscues is jaw-dropping….

This president and his closest aides are the most negligent managers of the federal government in our lifetimes.

There’s the Fast and Furious scandal, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, the IRS attack on conservative groups, the ObamaCare disaster, and now the Veterans Affairs scandal. These, along with others, have made White Press Secretary Jay Carney’s life miserable.

He has been the media mouthpiece for the administration since February 2011, the same administration that is “committed” to “transparency.” Here’s what the president said following his inauguration in 2009:

This article was first published at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, February 12, 2014:

Jeffrey Toobin may have been a little too enthusiastic in his announcement in the New Yorker magazine (issue dated February 17th) that Attorney General Eric Holder was going to be leaving the Department of Justice before the end of the year, perhaps even sooner. It was based on an interview Toobin had with Holder in late December:

In the February 17th issue of the New Yorker magazine Jeffrey Toobin wrote that, based on an interview he had with Attorney General Eric Holder back in December, Holder would be leaving office sometime this year, sooner perhaps than later. Almost immediately the Justice Department said that Toobin was misinterpreting what Holder meant, and

As President Obama’s poll numbers continue to drop, even his most ardent supporters are getting weary, according to the New York Times. Unhappiness over the president’s position on issues like the National Security Agency’s surveillance policies, the “red line” controversy over Syria with its threatened military intervention and the

During the second presidential debate of 2012, President Barack Obama said, “What I’m trying to do is get a broader conversation about how we reduce the violence generally. Part of it, is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.”

Obama is strongly opposed to concealed carry, has supported gun owner licensing and gun registration and voted to ban semi-automatic rifles, handguns and ammunition during his time in the Illinois State Senate. He even voted for the criminal prosecution of those who use a firearm in self-defense. (my emphasis)

This falls into the category of “so what else is new?” Of course the National Rifle Association (NRA) gives Obama an “F” because they have looked at his legislative record going all the way back to 1996, including his denials and dismissals concerning where he really stands on gun ownership and the Second Amendment.

Most people familiar with his record might be surprised, however, at just how consistently anti-gun (anti-freedom) he really is. Here’s a quick summary that answers the question about his “F” rating:

Why did Obama ban 1 million collectors grade Korean War Rifles from being imported and sold to citizens?

Why did Obama want to scrap military brass casings rather than sell them to reloading companies as has always been done?

Why does Obama support a federal assault weapons ban?

Why doesn’t Obama talk tough and make DC submit to the ruling of the supreme court and allow citizens the right to own handguns instead of letting them sidestep the ruling?

Why did Obama attempt to use ‘fast and furious’ as an anti gun prop to push for anti gun legislation?

Why does Obama support banning magazines over 10 rounds?

Why did Obama change our position in the UN and support the UN small arms treaty (gun banning legislation) once he came to office?